There was no one to see her. Gaby tugged off her clothes, hearing a button pop and her skirt rip even more. Her skin was pale and covered with goosebumps and the churning sea looked inhospitable, the rocks on either side menacing. But she reminded herself that this was what Nancy did every morning and strode towards the water’s edge, wincing as sharp stones pressed into her soles and giving a small shriek as the first wave curled over her foot, then sucked back. A few paces more and she was up to her thighs, giving ineffectual hops every time a wave threatened to break over her, crossing her arms over her chest to shield her breasts.
‘After the count of three,’ she instructed herself. ‘One, two, three …’ But still she didn’t submerge herself and start to swim until she lost her footing and sank, eyes stinging and choking on a mouthful of water. She thrashed back to the surface and saw that the undertow was already pulling her strongly towards the rocks. She flailed her arms in an approximation of the crawl, but she was a weak swimmer, a sunny-day floater in summer shallows, and now the sea was pulling at her and she could feel the colder current under her feet.
She tried to stand and found that she was out of her depth already. She turned to face the shore, although the sun in her eyes made it hard to see. There was the small disc of the beach, and there were her clothes in a tumbled heap. There was the slope she had struggled and slipped her way down, before a nasty little wave tossed itself into her face, into her stinging eyes. She spluttered and swallowed more water, struck out blindly.
Swimming lessons at school: other girls with their streamlined bodies and slick black swimming caps, arms raised, hands together, entering the water with never a splash, just a neat hole that opened at the touch of their steepled fingers and closed in on itself as their pressed-together feet dissolved from sight. And then they were the flickering, subterranean figures shifting along the floor of the pool; shape-changers, underwater birds. While she – hair cascading loose from the pinching cap and fingers wide open, as she had been told they should never be, her flesh soft and full, mouth open in a silent laugh of embarrassment at her own clumsiness – would go in, limbs flying apart and silver leaps of water all around her, then the sudden turquoise silence of the underwater world. If she had tried harder then, she wouldn’t be in this pickle now.
Now she closed her fingers, pulled at the swirling water and kicked her legs. Connor would be on the deck, holding heavy coils of rope, gathering heaps of sail into the bags. Ethan – where would Ethan be? Was anybody thinking of her right now? The sun was a yellow orb dangling inside her skull and the sky a metal sheet shimmering above her; the waves tipped and chucked her. For a moment, she thought that she would die out there and no one would ever find her, or even know where to look. Not waving but drowning. Then her feet scrabbled on the bottom and she was standing up, up to her waist. Below her waist, even – she could have stood before. She’d been splashing around in a frantic panic when the ground was beneath her feet. She gave a sobbing cough and waded against the tug of the tide up the shore, half falling, then stumbling on. She reached the pile of her clothes and turned to look back at the sea. The waves were small, the rocks mild, and it seemed so tame and easy.
She wrapped Nancy’s towel round her and stood, her limbs trembling with cold and shock, her teeth chattering. Then she rubbed herself dry, wincing as sand scoured her skin. She wrung out her hair and wrapped it, turban-like, in the towel. The sea had come in far enough to douse her clothes with spray, so that they were now wet and sandy. It was difficult to pull them on over her chilly, damp flesh, and the sandal straps rubbed against her gritty, blistered feet. This hadn’t been such a good idea, after all. Yet it had looked so beautiful from a distance, green-blue, welcoming and still.
Gaby’s skirt tore further on the bike ride home, when the hem caught in the bike chain. Her hair lashed her cheeks. Water dribbled down her neck. She was thankful when she arrived at the house and, with numb fingers, unlocked the door. She put the key under the boulder, for she wouldn’t need it again before she left in the morning, then squelched into the hall, leaving a watery trail behind her. She kicked off her sandals, then made her way upstairs to the spare bedroom, got undressed and wrapped herself in the dressing-gown she had used before. Next, she rinsed all her clothes and hung them over the boiler with the swimsuit and towel. She turned the hot water on at the immersion heater, boiled the kettle and poured water over a herbal tea-bag, then ran herself a deep bath, adding plenty of lavender bath foam.
Oh, but it was lovely. She held her nose and slid under the surface, staying there for as long as she could manage. This was her kind of water, hot and fragrant, making the tips of her fingers shrivel. She could stay there until it got dark, turning the tap with her big toe when the water cooled, watching day turn to evening out of the window, letting her flesh melt …
Later, she wouldn’t be able to remember what came next: it was simply a kaleidoscope of memories and feelings that glittered in her mind, forever rearranging itself into a different pattern. Did she have a glass of the shiraz, or was that after she had opened the first cardboard box in the spare bedroom and pulled out envelopes, folders of bank statements and bills, bundles of letters – all carefully ordered, some labelled and dated? Did she sit in the garden with a cigarette, watching the smoke coil into the air and dissipate while the stars hung low in the sky, or did she leaf through the photographs, one by one? There were so many, an album of a life thus far, and there’s something powerfully emotional about seeing a familiar face grow older under your fingers. Older, and perhaps less happy, or was that just what happened to a face as it left youth behind and gathered up the years in the creases round the eyes and the brackets round the mouth? Photographs of Nancy with her father, with her mother, with other tiny children – cousins, perhaps, though Nancy had never mentioned cousins – and with other, unfamiliar, adults.
It was with a jolt that left her breathless that Gaby was suddenly looking at her own life as well, her own face getting older: for there she was with Nancy, and Cindy Sheringham, sitting on the swings in the playground behind her old house. And there she was again, arm in arm with Nancy, in shorts and a T-shirt, and for a moment she was in Brighton again, on that day long ago. And again, a few photos later, she was with Nancy and with Gaby’s entire family – her mother partly obscured by an enormous brimmed hat that made her look like a gangster, her father blurred, and her three brothers tall and grinning in front of them. Stefan, Antony and Max. How young they all were then, how hopeful and boyish. Now Max was a banker, Antony sold cars and Stefan taught history at a university and never wore matching socks. As for Nancy, she stood very straight, her chin up in the pose Gaby knew so well, and stared intently at whoever had been taking the photograph. Then they were teenagers, their lips were red and they had earrings in their lobes and a more knowing way of posing for the camera. Gaby could hardly bear to look at some of the pictures, for they brought memories flooding back so strongly that she felt they might choke her. Ah, here was Stefan again – and no longer just one of Gaby’s brothers but Nancy’s boyfriend. Gaby knew that many of the photographs had been taken by Nancy; she even remembered her doing so – even thought she could hear the click of the button as she depressed it. And gradually she saw how she slid out of the pictures, or was on the sidelines. It was Stefan – at that twenty-first birthday party, in a suit, in swimming-trunks, at graduation, holding a bottle of champagne, sitting at a table outside a café in some foreign town, even out of focus on a bike. Every so often it was Stefan and Nancy in a group or posing together: an official couple, holding hands or smiling towards each other. And studying them, one after another, Gaby saw how in several of the photographs Nancy was looking at the camera, head lifted and gaze steady, while Stefan was turned towards her. It was two decades ago, but Gaby could see the contentment in his face. He felt safe. Even now it hurt to see it, knowing how it had ended.
There were several pictures of Gaby and Connor. How intense he was as a young ma
n, thought Gaby, studying her thin, dark-haired husband; how full of angles and fierce desires. He rarely smiled in photos, but there was one in which he gazed at the younger, grinning Gaby with a look of agonized delight as if he thought that she would melt away; in others, he scowled at the camera as if it was threatening him. She recognized that expression still, although as he had got older Connor had learnt how to mask some of his feelings, present an acceptable face to the world. She came to a photograph that made her flinch: Ethan as a tiny baby, lying swaddled in her lap and fast asleep. But was that really her? She was like an effigy who’d been propped up in an imitation of life. Her face was pasty and dull between the curtains of greasy hair, her expression fixed, her shoulders slumped. She had let herself forget the depths of her post-natal misery, but this picture brought it sharply back.
Then, abruptly, Gaby was no longer in the photographs, nor Connor, nor Stefan. They were out of Nancy’s life as if they’d never been there and in their place were strangers. Gaby felt her eyes burning with unshed tears. How could it have happened? How could all those rapt, smiling faces, all that seriousness of passion, have disappeared? The photographs that followed were more spaced out and better composed, as if Nancy was creating an acceptable version of her life with the messy bits left out, until at last Gaby was looking at what were clearly carefully selected printouts from a digital camera, often in black-and-white, and often of landscapes empty of human life. But here – then here, and here and here again – was a young man. Nancy liked to photograph him unawares, even in one photograph from behind, simply the fall of his dark hair over his neck and his broad shoulders as he faced the rippling sea. She examined each image carefully, noting the thick brows, the open face, the smile that put a dimple in one cheek. Nancy’s lover, then.
Certainly there had been a glass of wine after the photographs, probably drunk too quickly in cool, thirsty gulps, and another cigarette, with the window opened wide to let the smoke drift out into the autumn night. Gaby was ravenous to the point of faintness, so she made herself a thick and messy sandwich, stuffing as much ham, cheese and tomato into the baguette as she could, then liberally smearing it with mustard that she found in the cupboard. She looked around the kitchen and living room and saw that she was creating her characteristic mess, but she couldn’t deal with that at this moment. She’d clean up later. She ate standing up, pushing the bread into her mouth and chewing hungrily, washing it down with more wine.
When she had finished, she returned to the filing cabinet and the boxes, taking the wine with her. She was increasingly conscious of how badly she was behaving, but she was compelled by the urgent sense that she could find Nancy among the documents of her life, and make sense of the fugitive past. Then, at last, she would be released from it. For she had lost something when Nancy had abandoned her – not just that friendship, but with it a sense of certainty, a knowledge of being loved as she was, with nothing to prove. People can be felled by the death of a spouse, or by divorce, they talk about it endlessly, as if by putting it into words they can make the loss more bearable. But Gaby thought that being left by a best friend could be equally painful, yet there was no proper way to mourn or express it. Connor had never fully understood how she had felt about it – how could he? He didn’t have best friends like that. He had dozens of colleagues and acquaintances, and with each one he expressed a different side of himself. But Gaby had always felt that Nancy saw her whole. She had been the only person in the world that Gaby didn’t try to charm. The pledge they had made that they’d still know each other at ninety, and the loss of that relationship, which should have stretched from childhood to old age and death, still haunted Gaby, but it was only now, riffling through Nancy’s life like this, that she realized how much.
She didn’t open the envelope that had the word ‘Will’ printed on it, and she put to one side all the folders that contained the deeds of the house, the details of the mortgage, life insurance, car insurance. She barely glanced at the bank statements, only noting that they were – as she had expected – arranged in chronological order. One drawer of the cabinet was given over to Nancy’s work and she didn’t bother with that, but she did open a hard-backed notebook whose pages were unlined and thick. On the first page, there was a pen-and-ink drawing of Nancy’s house, and on the second a half-completed watercolour of a church. Then there were several pages of sea birds, meticulously drawn. Gaby turned the pages slowly, stopping when she came to words, arranged like a poem but not really reading like one, although she spoke them out loud: ‘“It can be hard to get from day to day or, at least, it is never simple. I must have lost the knack somewhere along the way. I look at people and I wonder how they do it with such apparent ease. I wonder what is happening behind their cheerful faces. Are we all just pretending? Are we all made up of secrets and of lies? Or is it only me?”’ Gaby read it again, to herself, then turned the page and saw a doodled portrait of a face she didn’t recognize. Opposite it was another, more intricate, drawing, of a door with carved panels, and words scrawled underneath: ‘I close this door.’ Then sea birds again, curved beaks and delicate long legs, and a final pencil sketch of a male body, sitting down but bowed over so that only the back of the head, the serrated spine and the muscled, outstretched arms could be seen.
Gaby pushed away the book and poured more wine. She sat with her back against the bed and sipped it slowly, closing her eyes and feeling tiredness gather in her skull. Nancy had told her that she never dreamt, but surely that couldn’t be true. Everyone had dreams. She turned her attention to Nancy’s school reports. What a good student she had been – teachers who had called Gaby ‘indolent’ and ‘irrational’ and ‘messy’ used words like ‘exemplary’ for Nancy. But school reports rarely yield up a person’s secrets. Gaby soon tired of flicking through the years, following her friend’s sure progress up the school, her prizes and medals and positions of responsibility.
Then there were the letters, a great many, held in separate bundles by thick rubber bands. Gaby pulled one such bundle out and peered into the first envelope. The writing was spidery, and in faded blue ink, and she saw that it wasn’t addressed to Nancy but to an Emily; the ‘E’ was curled and the ‘y’ trailed its tail back under the name. There was a date at the top: 19 April 1958. The signature at the bottom was hard to make out, but Gaby assumed that these must be letters from Nancy’s father to her mother, well before Nancy was born. She slid the pack back into its place and randomly pulled out another, much slimmer one. The first letter was from a woman called Janet, writing from New York and describing a visit to the Frick Museum in too much detail. The next was from Mexico and this time was a mini-lecture on the murals of Diego Rivera. Gaby had never heard of Janet and she couldn’t think why Nancy should keep such pompous epistles. There were a few from Marcus – presumably an old flame, for between paragraphs of news there were endearments. He missed Nancy, he said; he thought of her face on the pillow. Gaby read only one of his letters. She found it strange that there had been men like Marcus in Nancy’s life, and she hadn’t known.
It was with a prickly sense of disquiet that she recognized her own handwriting when she was eleven, and pulled letters from herself out of the drawer. She couldn’t remember writing so many, yet here they all were and she could follow herself from a child, letters round and unformed and smeared with ink, to a teenager and into her twenties. There were postcards from summer holidays in Wales and Brittany and, once, Spain, describing blue seas and yummy crêpes and gales that had blown down the whole camping site. There were airmail letters on flimsy paper, the sides gummed together, and there were letters from university. She told Nancy about things she could no longer remember – parties, grades, boys, holiday plans. About Connor. She made arrangements. And finally – on one side of cream-coloured notepaper, in a large and almost illegible hand – she had written: ‘Nancy, please please please please please get in touch. Please.’ No name at the end. She had sent that letter to Nancy’s mother to forward and n
ever even known it had arrived. But here it was, and Nancy had never answered.
She didn’t read Stefan’s letters; couldn’t bring herself to commit what seemed like a double betrayal. She only glanced at the dates to see if he had written since Nancy had left, and it was when she was replacing the bundle that she found a single letter that she almost didn’t bother to read, because it was typed and looked formal and, anyway, she was becoming queasy about her spying, and could feel the ominous first throbs of a migraine above her left eye. She could so easily have overlooked them – the words that, however much she stared at them, however much she shut her eyes, then opened them again, still read:
Dear Nancy Belmont,
As you must know, I turned eighteen a few days ago, and you have probably been wondering if you would hear from me. At least, you posted your details on the Adoption Contact Register and so did I. So, several days ago I was given your name and address, and it was up to me whether to use them. I think I would like to meet you. There are questions I want to know the answer to. Could you write to me at the above address to let me know if you will see me? I don’t know when – we live a long way from each other and, anyway, I don’t think I am quite ready yet. Please do not telephone or anything like that. It wouldn’t feel right. And my parents do not know that I am contacting you.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Sonia Hamilton
The Moment You Were Gone Page 14